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The Film Machine. Mechanical Metaphors in Avant-Garde Film is a series of avant-garde films from the 1920s and 1930s relating to the impact of machines on the modern world and society, from the first European abstract and futurist experiments to Soviet propaganda films and American comedies, passing through pioneering science fiction films. The aim of this combination of narrative and experimental genres is to illustrate how the world of the machine inspired both the industry and avant-garde artists. The fascination first appeared in pioneering films by the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès (Paris, 1861-1938), Segundo de Chomón (Teruel 1871- Paris 1929) and other anonymous artists, whose work introduces this series.

The old concept of a person used to refer to oneself and to others is losing its meaning. Discourses as varied (and antagonistic) as science, religion, politics, philosophy and art indicate this movement clearly. This video programme features an orographic exploration and partial signposting of the terrain of video action, a perfect microcosm of what appears to be taking place on a different scale. Far from offering responses or interpretations, it aspires to contribute to the ruling confusion, adding new symptoms that speak equally of the generalised deterioration of these inescapably decomposing bodies.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents an anthological series divided into eight programmes on the first ten years of video as a means for artistic expression in the United States, an exhaustive look at its use in phenomenological and conceptual explorations. The First Decade in Perspective. Video Art and Alternative Mediain the United States reflects attempts to establish a criticism of the North American television culture, to introduce new voices in the art world, and to capture experiments in the field of performance art, creating a new visual language.

On the occasion of the International Dance Festival in Madrid,In Two Dimensions: Dance on the Screen is a series that features an international selection of film-video-dance dedicated to the auteur. The pieces included in the seven programmes in the series were made by renowned artists who present different ways to contemplate audiovisual creation, finding their partenaire in the choreographic arts. Choreographers and directors analyse, structure, observe and direct the viewer’s gaze through the body and the movement of performers who order/disorder ideas and feelings. Moreover, each is done in a personal way, paving often extremely divergent paths, where the relationship between the two resources materialises for very different reasons.

The series Of Blood, of Pleasure and of Death…presents a selection of experimental films with gay and lesbian themes designed to show some of the key pieces of avant-garde and underground film, putting them into context and in relation to the mass culture that generated them. The series title, in part inspired by the film trilogy by Gregory Markopoulos (Toledo, 1928 - Freiburg, 1992) Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort (1947-1948) acts as a metaphor for a series of films that, like the work by Markopoulos, see ‘blood, pleasure and death’ as an imaginary place where the desire, pain and the annihilation of the body are confronted and its being is oppressed by social norms and sexual taboos. The second part of the title, Some Films on ‘Sexual Disorientation’, in turn, relates to the confirmation of a fact: gay and lesbian film did ‘not’ exist before the 1970s or if it existed, it was limited to only two or three works. Given that the idea of a group or concept of gay and lesbian identity based on the term sexual ‘orientation’ did not exist (it emerged in the 1970s), this body of films cannot easily be described using those terms. This does not mean to say that there were no sexually ambiguous films suggesting ‘strange’ desires or ‘disoriented’ artists and filmmakers. Hundreds of films featured homosexual characters, but very few were made by homosexuals and even fewer had a gay or lesbian content.

This film and video series presents an overview of the film work of the North American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (New York, 1943-1978), an oeuvre that was largely forgotten for a long period of time. Beginning early in the 1970s until his death in 1978, Matta-Clark was one of the main driving forces on the New York SoHo art scene, characterised by his experiments aimed at breaking the limits that define an artwork, altering the structures established in the art world and exploding numerous means of artistic expression.

This series is dedicated to the film work of Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 1933), sixteen films made between 1966 and 1982 that fill a unique space in the history of independent film in the United States. Yoko Ono participated in a general assault on film conventions during an extraordinarily creative period in American culture, during which directors developed alternative forms of production, distribution and exhibition. Coming from the same complex set of interdisciplinary experiences that inspired performance art and objects during those years, Ono’s films are like her songs (with their characteristic abstract expressivity) and like her artworks and sculptures because they too focus on materials in such a way that they expose the very phenomenon of perception.

Elementary Triptych of Spain is the last film project by José Val del Omar. The idea arose in the last stages of his life and was aimed at creating a trilogy using his three ‘elemental pieces’: Aguaespejo granadino [Water-Mirror of Granada] (1955), Fuego en Castilla [Fire in Castille] (1960) and Acariño galaico [Galician Caress] (1961).

For the second year in a row, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is dedicating an audiovisual programme to video dance, a genre that is validated by some of the most representative works in the field. Choreographic art, expressed through moving images, continues to generate unique works which are beautiful and intense, and in which audiovisual creation displays its wealth of formats, techniques and styles. Dance on camera occupies and attains unique spaces, reorganising ‘real’ time and championing their communicative capacity.

Once upon a Time…from Minimal Art to Cabaret: 1970s - 90s is a series dedicated to performance art made by women designed to introduce the works and approaches that have served as reference points for many of the latest creations in the visual arts. The pieces in this programme, which spans almost three decades, show the richness and dynamism of this means of expression and help to explain the development of performance art and its versatility.

Lights, Action, Sound and Movement…for the Camera is an anthology that describes the relationship between video and performance art over the last 25 years. Although it brings together some of the most representative pieces created by important figures in this field, the programme as a whole does not presume to present a definitive history of video performance. Rather, it is designed to show the evolution of this hybrid form, which is increasingly complex and developed, in four different programmes.

The series Retrospective: German Video Art presents a retrospective of German video art from the 1980s to the present day. Axel Wirths, the curator, has organised the programme (a total of 34 pieces) into five blocks of works grouped according to their thematic dichotomies: Body and Soul, Politics and Daily Life, Nature and Technology, Music and Language and Irony and Fate.

The intensity with which Australians possess and use consumer electronics is famous. Indeed, by using videos and computers, Australian artists have managed to avoid what has been called ‘the tyranny of distance’. For artists like John McCormack (Melbourne, 1964), the computer has become a way to escape the limitations of the physical world. An Eccentric Orbit: Video Art in Australia presents a selective look at a varied and abundant field: contemporary electronic artworks produced in Australia between 1980 and 1995. The programme is divided into three thematic sections. The programme entitled The Body Electric contains works that contemplate falling into a physical and psychological trap, proposing a release through dreams, technology and the imagination. The second block, entitled Any Resemblance to Reality is Purely Deliberate, deals with the magic of construction and deconstruction in or by the computer culture, while the works included in the section Reduced Paradise reflect on place and the lack of location. The themes in each programme represent what could be considered the three concerns of contemporary Australian culture condensed into the work of video artists and directors. Obviously each of these themes refers to the gestalt of a culture immersed in the post-industrialist dualisms found in all western civilisation: the active construction of the ‘perceived’ polarities between nature and culture, nature and technology and human beings and technology. However, without openly resorting to an ‘Australian’ iconography, most of the artists in these three programmes present a curiously idiosyncratic approach to electronic culture, resulting in a reflection on video and computer storage devices, the most easily transportable media available to artists. These same media are also extremely useful for citizens living in a country that can only be reached by an almost daylong flight from Europe and even longer from the East Coast of the United States.

In 1990, the Cinemadart festival in Barcelona brought together a dozen prestigious Spanish specialists to reflect on different questions related to the conjunction of surrealists, surrealism and film. The Surrealist Gaze is a film and video series that compiles the criteria of the retrospective put together by Julio Pérez Perucha to illustrate those debates.

Video Signals: Aspects of Spanish Video Creation in Recent Years is an audiovisual series that features 40 works by more than 35 artists made between 1988 and 1995, designed to offer a view/review of recent Spanish video. The exhibition was not conceived as a ‘who’s who’ of video in Spain - i.e., the artists with the longest careers and biggest reputations - but rather as a type of critical anthology, to borrow from the world of literature. The selection is neither indiscriminate nor whimsical, the range neither wide nor narrow, but spacious enough to include some new contributions andones that might have passed unnoticed on other circuits. However, no attempt has been made to cover specific genres or subgenres - such as the standard music video clip, video dance, art documentary and the occasional television productions with an experimental touch - even though the selection does include some pieces linked or contiguous with them. In any case, the selection is admittedly partial in every sense of the word.

Wanderers: Reflections on Exile is a video programme that ‘upsets’ the relationship maintained with Spain and the identity of individuals in society, looking at the margins to take stock of the occasional pleasures and evils that result from different types of exile: physical exile, made up of political exiles, refugees, self-declared ex-pats, immigrants and ‘perpetual travellers’ and mental exile, made up of insane, alienated, depressed, marginalised, unconscious and creative people.

This series features a selection of pieces from the World Wide Video Festival ’95 that highlight the diversity and limits of video art today. Video has never been a ‘pure’ medium, since it can be combined with and complemented by film, photography, performance art and, increasingly, computer techniques. The range of aesthetic and formal focus points, from an almost pictorial poetic narrative to abstract explorations of electronic chaos, is very wide. Free from the restrictions imposed by television and film advertising, video artists enjoy complete freedom to choose their own formats. Beyond the documentary genre, many concentrate substance and content into short but powerful audiovisual declarations.

With a view to providing a multi-disciplinary overview of Eugènia Balcells’ (Barcelona, 1942) career as an artist and as a complement to the exhibition being shown on the third floor of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, her experimental films from the 1970s are being screened. In addition, two sessions of the performance piece Imágenes para sonidos will be staged with the collaboration of musicians Peter van Riper and Llorenç Barber.

Choreographing for the Camera is a film, video and conference series on the concept of video dance that includes audiovisual pieces somewhere between dance, film and video created by directors, choreographers and dancers working together. To reconstruct the process since Merce Cunningham and Nam June Paik made their first video dance piece, it is important to remember that modern dance and film have been conjoined since the outset and have had cyclical moments of intense collaboration. The appearance of video - the tool closest to avant-garde movements - at the time of the ascendency of the creation of contemporary dance in the United States and Europe rekindled a desire to experiment among choreographers. The possibility of participating in the great communicative power of audiovisual media tempted many young choreographers who found new staging spaces and new ways of reaching in the public in images. The 1980s were a golden age for video dance productions, especially in France and Belgium, where public institutions decisively supported their creators. Festivals and shows like the Centre Pompidou’s Video Danse and competitions like Grand Prix and Dance Screen organised by the International Music + Media Center (IMZ), became meeting points for the profession and a thermometer of the quality and quantity of productions in the genre, and also revealed the growing interest of television programmers. It was during these years as well that video dance began to appear in Spain: La Mostra de Video-Dansa in Barcelona was a driving force, not only from the point of view of dissemination, but also in terms of production in the country. In Madrid, festivals like Madrid en Danza provided annual grants, while the Metrópolis (TVE) and Piezas (Canal+) programmes regularly broadcast national and international video dance programmes.

Computer-generated images and interactive virtual reality systems, both products of a graphic evolution in images and the historical development of the interaction between artist, artwork and viewer, have heralded a complete transformation in traditional art practices. Everything Flows: Spanish Computer Graphics is a collection of videos that illustrate this important transformation in Spain through a selection of some of the most outstanding works of the last ten years, from the first computer-generated piece by Juan Carlos Eguillor (San Sebastian, 1947 - Madrid, 2001) to works made in the sphere of virtual reality by Águeda Simó and telematic projects by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City, 1967).

On This Side of the Channel: British Video Art is a retrospective made up of four programmes of video art, computer animation and other creative works produced for commercial television in the British Isles that stand out from other electronic works because of their originality and the quality. Spanning a quarter century (from the first formal experiments to recent projects using more sophisticated technology), this programme presents a revealing record of British artists who have used electronic media to make important, vibrant creations as an alternative to commercial television. The first set of works, grouped under the title A Brief History of British Video Art: 1975 - 1990, offers a historical overview of video art projects that includes works by David Hall (Leicester, 1937), Jeremy Welsh (Gateshead, 1954), Mona Hatoum (Beirut, 1952) and Keith Piper (Malta, 1960); the second, New British Video: 1990 - 1994, focuses on a short period of four years to highlight the richness of the most recent work, including pieces by Michael Curran (Scotland, 1963), Steve Hawley, Andrew Stones (Sheffield, 1960) and Terry Flaxton (London, 1953); while A Brief Introduction to British Computer Animation: 1968 - 1994 returns to a more extended timeframe to spotlight the most important examples from the world of computer graphics, almost from its very beginnings. The programme starts off with some of the first experimental projects done in the domain of computer-animated images, featuring artists like Tony Pritchett (England, 1938), Stan Hayward (England, 1930) and Darrell Viner (Coventry, 1946 - London, 2001), and ends with some truly surprising and sophisticated technological pieces, exemplified by Alan Schechner, William Latham (England, 1961) and Andrew Budd. Finally, the works grouped under the title Virtual Television focus on a highly innovative group of electronic pieces that were either especially produced for or premiered on British television, such as First Direct,directed by Marc Ortmans, A Short History of the Wheel (1993) by Tony Hill (London, 1946) and Stooky Bill (1990) by David Hall.

Video art, an art trend that uses video as its medium, has served as a form of expression for a large number of Spanish artists. It is relatively young: it was born at the end of the 1960s and, since the first works appeared, its evolution has been paired with technological advances in the medium. Video Art: The First 25 Years commemorates the first quarter century of this means of artistic expression with an anthological exhibition curated by Barbara London that includes 48 works in chronological order from the early years of video until the 1990s. The programme features North American artists such as Nam June Paik (Seoul 1932 - Miami, 2006), Bill Viola (New York, 1951), Gary Hill (Santa Monica, 1951), Laurie Anderson (Glen Ellyn, 1957), Peter Callas (Sidney, 1952) and Woody Vasulka (Brno, 1937). Taken as a whole, these works provide an exemplary review of the historical evolution of video and a great opportunity to become acquainted with its main trends.

Cyberculture is upon us. It is the last movement of the 20th century. Its supporters are the first cyberspace nomads: a heterogeneous group of visionary scientists, hackers, computer-fan musicians and digital image artists. Their interests range from high technology to virtual games, from hypertext to smart drinks, from cyberpunk literature to the Internet and brain implants. Their motto: Information must be free! Art Futura ’94: Cyberculture is a video and conference programme designed to draw attention to this new and fascinating universe.

The Cave is a multi-channel video installation by Beryl Korot (New York, 1945) with music by Steve Reich (New York, 1936) inspired by the multimedia opera The Cave (1994), the first collaboration between the two artists, made up of music, video and theatre for 13 musicians and four singers. The title of The Cave comes from the only site in the world that is sacred to both Jews and Muslims: the Cave of the Patriarchs where Abraham is buried with his descendents. The piece tells the biblical story of Abraham and his family from a contemporary perspective. Beryl Korot and Steve Reich studied the common roots of Judaism, Islam and Christianity in a series of interviews with members of these religions, asking them: Who is Abraham? And Sarah? And Hagar? Ishmael? Isaac? The answers, collected in testimonials from Israelis and Palestinians living in Jerusalem and inhabitants of New York and Austin in the United States, were recorded by the artists on video and audiotapes and provide the framework for the reflections on modern culture, religion and human relationships presented in this work.

New Trends from the World Wide Video Festival 1993-1994 is a single-channel video programme that brings together a selection of works representative of the dominant trends at the 12th World Wide Video Festival, a very broad - though always random - review of the immense diversity found today in multimedia art. Within the variety inherent in the programme, it is possible to identify some larger trends. Many of the works reveal a desire for political commitment, a motif that has become stronger in recent years as many of the artists have become obsessed with the changes in the world, especially in the Eastern Bloc and China. There is also a tendency to mix an artist’s images with earlier ones, as well as an important increase in elements from performance pieces and videos based on performance art. An upsurge in documentary-type productions made by and about artists from a very personal point of view is also notable. Finally, many of the works in this selection share an autobiographical intent.

A Sampling of Film and Video from the 1993 Whitney Biennial is a film and video programme that brings together some of the pieces featured at the Biennial held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993. The museum, a key institution in the art world, has traditionally been the place where art has been evaluated. However, until recently, the exhibitions there tended to give priority to their analysis of the historiographical aspects of production without sufficiently considering the complexity that characterises the use of the media in contemporary culture. The media arts today respond to the public setting in which we live and they draw on it, creating a fluid discourse that makes a more varied relationship possible between the artist and the artwork, as well as between artists and society, efficiently subverting the dominion of a uniform national identity.

The concept of extended art as designed and practiced by Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921 - Düsseldorf, 1986) requires communication routes that go beyond traditional exhibition forms, in addition to photography and text. Actions are a central medium in his work, as are his appearances in public during conferences and debates and the long-term processes that he initiated with projects like 7,000 Oaks. The structural elements in these works can be captured by film and video. By recording the images and sounds of these events and actions, which date back many years in Beuys’ oeuvre, they can be more intensely reproduced, while the visual documents offer reliable material for analysis at the same time. This series of screenings presents an approach to the themes in Joseph Beuys’ work with the assistance of extracts and examples from the artist’s audiovisual legacy that include hundreds of scenes in order to illustrate his human side and illuminate the incredibly complex structure of his artistic work from another angle. The videos and films that recorded his actions, like Eurasia Siberian Symphony, Celtic and Filz TV, contain numerous references to earlier situations and contexts for using the materials and objects that form part of installations today as reminiscences of his actions or are found in collections as isolated pieces. In this way, it is possible to experience the genesis of specific works and the nature of the process of the overall work. The visual documents complete the installations and the exhibited objects.

Paris (Europe) Here: New Video Trends in France is a video programme that responds to current questions about the place occupied by videos produced in France today in the field of the visual arts, undeniably confirming its role as a specific place where the different creative currents found in this field for decades cross and interweave. It is a place, a function, a space and a time where artists do not have to defend themselves against film or the visual arts to implant their own compositions in every corner. Subjecting themselves to otherness, carrying the other with them like an agent of the ego, these works calmly pass by earlier fights, the battles won and lost in the fields of creation and dissemination.

1993 marks 30 years since the spring-summer of 1963 when Nam June Paik (Seoul, 1932 - Miami, 2006) inaugurated his Exposition of Music-Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass inWuppertal. Having acquired a mythical aura over the years, the event is considered to represent the birth of the electronic arts today. This video programme reflects recent investigations in the field, which have made it possible to recover and publically present some of Paik’s ealiest work - particularly his experimental films, early videos and the first intermedia audiovisual explorations - now rescued from the oblivion in which they lay for 30 years.